Wednesday, July 24, 2013

The current issue of Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures includes Jenny Wills' terrific 13-page review--which toward the end bursts into a hybrid review/article in which Wills discusses contemporary subjects such as Barbie and Bratz dolls. Here are some highlights:

"Racial Innocence is a provocative, insightful, and bold text that demonstrates how important the field of cultural studies is and can be. Texts and topics are interwoven with poignant commentaries about race and identity in a way that insists that Bernstein's aruments are equally relevant to scholars interested in youth narratives and cultures as well as those of us working in critical race studies. . . . In Racial Innocence, however, we get more than a historically grounded cultural reading of print and non-print texts. We get a framework through which we might think through a variety of objects in terms of their implications on childhood, race, and innocence. Most importantly, Bernstein reminds us that sentimental, picturesque, and childhood playthings are not benign or devoid of serious racialized implications. This critical book goes beyond the specific texts that its author addresses, although Bernstein does move between subjects with finesse and expertise; Racial Innocence casts a much-needed spotlight onto so many of the artifacts from our daily environments." Jenny Wills, "Scripted Violence, Scripted Deferral: Pre- and Post-Civil Rights Racial Innocence," Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 5.1 (2013): 179-191.

I saw hundreds of dolls at the Shelburne Museum, but the ones that really stay with me are these two:

These are very special, rare, beautiful dolls. To explain what makes them so interesting, I have to provide some background on dolls and race.

Dolls are political--not only in how they look, but also in how they feel, and how their materiality invites different kinds of play. In Racial Innocence, I wrote a lot about soft dolls that were designed to accommodate children's rough play. In the U.S. in the nineteenth century, a few small cottage industries began manufacturing such dolls. Small-scale makers of soft commercial dolls included Izannah Walker, Martha Jenks Chase, and Julia Jones Beecher, half-sister to Harriet Beecher Stowe. These white women all lived and worked in the postbellum North, but each manufactured at least one Plantation-style black doll. The Shelburne Museum owns, for example, this "mammy" doll manufactured by Martha Jenks Chase sometime between 1890 and 1900:

As I showed in my book, white nineteenth-century American children routinely subjected soft black dolls to enormous violence, and this violence was not only tolerated but encouraged by white adults who viewed such acts as racially innocent.

But there's another part of the story. Until the Civil Rights Movement, most commercial black dolls in the United States were caricatured and grotesque--but in Germany and France, a whole other vision of black people flourished. As Myla Perkins demonstrates in her two-volume masterpiece, Black Dolls: An Identification and Value Guide, nineteenth-century dollmakers in France and Germany produced black dolls with the same molds they used to produce white dolls. The resulting black dolls were beautiful and non-caricatured. Unfortunately, because they were expensive imports, few African American children had access to them. In the U.S., most owners of these dolls were wealthy white girls.

Which brings us back to the white, wealthy Electra Havemeyer Webb, who added these beautiful dolls to her museum collection in 1951. These dolls are made of papier-mâché, and the Shelburne Museum identifies them as German, most likely produced in the 1850s (they were about a century old, then, when the museum acquired them). Unlike other German dolls which were produced with molds that were also used for white dolls, these dolls' faces and hair seem designed to represent the features of people of African descent.

The woman wears fine clothes and a bonnet, with detailing in the trim and buttons. While it is possible that the doll was intended to represent a servant, she does not present only that image (unlike the Martha Jenks Chase "mammy" doll and so many others like it). Her face is finely-drawn, realistic, and lovely. There is no hint of mockery.

The man is more ambiguous. He could represent a gentleman, or he could represent a servant in livery. Despite this ambiguity, this doll projects dignity. His clothing is, like the female doll's, carefully detailed in rich cloth. And the face beautifully represents African-diasporic features. In both cases, the large eyes and full cheeks reflect the period's conventions in doll-faces more than those of racist caricature.

How did these fragile dolls survive a century in which the abuse of black dolls was the norm? Were they owned by black children? Did they survive because they were loved and treated tenderly? Did they survive because they were unloved and ignored? As with most dolls, it is difficult or even impossible to determine precisely what relationship they had with individual children and adults in the past. But we can imagine. And we can pause to look these dolls in the face and to remember: no matter how deeply the nineteenth century was steeped in racist imagery, counter-images existed. "Mammy" and other caricatures dominated black dolls prior to the Civil Rights Movement. And because they were so dominant, so denigrating, and so damaging, it is easy to forget that other kinds of dolls existed. But they did exist--and when we see them in places like the Shelburne Museum, we should pause, pay attention, and really take in the beauty before us.

Racial Innocence

SYNOPSIS OF RACIAL INNOCENCE

In Racial Innocence, Robin Bernstein argues that the concept of "childhood innocence" has been central to U.S. racial formation since the mid-nineteenth century. Children--white ones imbued with innocence, black ones excluded from it, and others of color erased by it--figured pivotally in sharply divergent racial agendas from slavery and abolition to antiblack violence and the early civil rights movement.

Bernstein takes up a rich archive including books, toys, theatrical props, and domestic knickknacks which she analyzes as "scriptive things" that invite or prompt historically-located practices while allowing for resistance and social improvisation. Integrating performance studies with literary and visual analysis, Bernstein offers singular readings of theatrical productions from blackface minstrelsy to Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; literary works by Joel Chandler Harris, Harriet Wilson, and Frances Hodgson Burnett; material culture including Topsy pincushions, Uncle Tom and Little Eva handkerchiefs, and Raggedy Ann dolls; and visual texts ranging from fine portraiture to advertisements for lard substitute. Throughout, Bernstein shows how "innocence" gradually became the exclusive province of white children--until the Civil Rights Movement succeeded not only in legally desegregating public spaces, but in culturally desegregating the concept of childhood itself.

PRAISE FOR RACIAL INNOCENCE

"One of those rare books that shifts the paradigm—a book that, in years to come, will be recognized as a landmark in children’s literature and childhood studies. . . . [F]ew scholars can write a sentence like Bernstein can: packed with insight, theoretically sophisticated, and yet lucid—even, at times, lyrical.”Philip Nel, Children’s Literature

"Nineteenth and early twentieth-century material culture comes alive in Robin Bernstein's brilliant study of the racialized and gendered ideologies that shape, inform and continue to haunt notions of American childhood into the present day. Through imaginative and masterfully innovative archival research, Bernstein shows how representations of childhood and child's play are integral to the making of whiteness and blackness and citizenship in this country. Racial Innocence is a groundbreaking book that for the first time illuminates the powerful and critical connections between constructions of girlhood, racial formations and American popular culture." Daphne Brooks, Princeton University

"I know of virtually no one of her generation who writes with this kind of verve, authority and pleasure." Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Amherst College

About Me

I am a cultural historian who writes about two subjects: theatre/performance and childhood. Sometimes I study these topics together; other times I study them separately. In addition to Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, my books include the edited anthology Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater and a Jewish feminist children’s book titled Terrible, Terrible! My essays have appeared in PMLA, Social Text, African American Review, American Literature, J19, Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, and other journals. I am the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. I'm also a faculty member in Harvard's doctoral program in American Studies and undergraduate program in Theater, Dance, and Media. With Stephanie Batiste and Brian Herrera, I edit the book series Performance and American Cultures for New York University Press. Visit me at http://scholar.harvard.edu/robinbernstein/home.